Nathan Kamesar, Tribe 12’s friend and local rabbinical student, offers Jewish wisdom and timely teachings on our blog. 

 

“You shall rejoice before Adonai your God for seven days,” Leviticus says, in reference to Sukkot (23:40). You must be happy.

Can this be? Can God, or our ancestors, or whoever you believe composed our sacred texts, command a feeling? Is this a sensible approach to legislating Jewish law?

Thou Shalt Feel The Feels

It is far from the only instance of commanding an emotion in the Torah. “You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might,” it says in Deuteronomy 6:5. You shall also love your “fellow” (Lev. 19:18), the “stranger” (Lev. 19:34), and, by implication, yourself (Lev. 19:18, 34).

Our sacred text does not stop with seeking to compel us to experience positive feelings; it instructs us not to feel negative feelings as well. “You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart” (Lev. 19:17); “You shall not . . . bear a grudge against your countrymen” (Lev. 19:18); and, of course, perhaps the verse we’re most familiar with, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not crave your neighbor’s house, or … or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Deut. 5:18). A West Wing episode has fun with a storyline in which a U.S. town wants to abolish all laws except the Ten Commandments. West Wing staffers observe that the commandment that “you shall not covet” will be hard to enforce, observing further that if one was to be arrested for violating that law, they would probably also violate the commandment regarding bearing false witness.

So what are we to do with this? How do we wrap our heads around being commanded to feel a feeling? It is one thing to have our conduct prescribed for us. This happens all the time in Judaism (eat Kosher food; keep Shabbat; hear the Shofar blast on Rosh Hashanah). But a feeling? As moderns, we sometimes feel like we can’t generate a feeling that doesn’t come naturally to us even if we wanted to. (For a different take on this question, check out this interesting article on Haaretz.)

And yet there seems to be some wisdom here. For starters there is a debate about whether emotions are actually being commanded here. Perhaps what is being commanded instead relates to the actions that flow from those emotions.

Feelings Lead To Actions

Ancient notions of love, for example, often came up in the context of treaties between ruling tribes (suzerains) and subservient tribes (vassals) and, according to scholars like Dr. Jeffrey Tigay, “love” in the context of those treaties essentially meant “loyalty towards.” “We Canaanites pledge to love [that is, act loyally towards] King [so-and-so] of the Hittites,” for example.

(The subversive, radical component of the Torah was that it pledged this love, this commitment to act loyally, towards God rather towards a human manifestation of a ruler. Something unseen rather than seen.)

Similarly, the Hebrew words for covet (chamad), and crave (tit’aveh), according to Tigay, can also be seen as concerned about the actions that flow from these ideas. Chamad could instead be translated do not “scheme to acquire,” and tit’aveh as do not “long for.” When translated this way, we can see that the nature of the commandment not to covet is related to a concern that the offender will act on their jealous impulses. “Do not scheme to acquire” essentially means do not let it get so close that you might act on your jealous impulses or that you might actually do something that is harmful to your neighbor or your community.

Back To Sukkot Though…

By this logic, the commandment to rejoice on Sukkot is not a commandment that you literally must be happy; it is a more general statement regarding the sorts of activities that should be taking place during Sukkot: have festive meals; invite people over; dance — carry on activities that, even if you are not happy, are associated with joy. It is a festive time of year for the Jewish people because of the ancient ingathering the harvest; act as though you are feeling consonant with the spirit of your people, even if you are not. (Or, if you have to sit out one year because you are really not up to it, so be it. But know that these are the sorts of activities that will be happening around you.)

The idea that when feelings are commanded, actions are called for is a very plausible reading of the text (perhaps even the most plausible). But I think there is a more interesting, more radical reading available to us as well.

Now Is the Time to Nurture Your Joyful Wolf

Perhaps the Author(s) of this text are indeed centrally concerned with how we as a people feel — what emotions we are experiencing — and the text is indeed instructing us to do what we can to be in control of our emotions — to open up our internal passageways to let the Divine light shine through.

Now, we know it’s not always as simple as that. If we could tell someone who was experiencing depression or grief, to simply “buck up”… well, then the world would be a different sort of place. (And perhaps not an altogether desirable one). We know that’s not how things work.

But there are other emotions we can perhaps control to a limited extent. We may not be able to control what antagonizes us, but, with work, we sometimes have the ability to realize that we have been antagonized — to be mindful of what has coming over us at any given moment.

We might not have the ability to control how we react to a particular stimulus but sometimes we can control how long we dwell on something. Or, as implied by the statement in Leviticus 19, how long we bear a grudge. “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die,” an adage of unknown origins, is, perhaps what our ancestors were getting at.

Another folktale of unknown (perhaps Native American) origin illustrates this. A man says to his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.” The boy thinks about it and asks his grandfather, “Which one wins?” And the grandfather says, “the one you feed.”

Which brings us back to Sukkot and the commandment to rejoice for seven days. We can’t necessarily just be happy. We can’t necessarily just flip that switch. But we can nurture the parts of ourselves that yearn to be joyful. We can give ourselves permission to be happy. We can find the seeds of joy in our lives, tend to them, embrace them, and make them feel comfortable. After all, it’s a mitzvah. It’s a commandment.

Nathan Kamesar, Tribe 12’s friend and local rabbinical student, offers Jewish wisdom and timely teachings on our blog. 

 

We’ve reached it. The High Holiday season. The Yamim Noraim — the Days of Awe.

Some of us approach these days with dread: there’s nothing pleasant about fasting for most of us. In fact, the words of Torah that led to this ritual are initem et nafshoteichem (Lev. 23:27), variously translated as “[you] shall afflict your souls,” or “you shall practice self-denial.” The point is, in a sense, pain. The point is to make sure we are afflicting or depriving ourselves in some way.

Finding Purpose and Opportunity in Pain

And yet, it is pain with a purpose. As the Torah states only a few words later, “ki yom kippurim hu, l’chaper aleichem (Lev 23:28): “For it is a day of atonement on which expiation is made on your behalf.” We have the opportunity to clean our slate.

And what an opportunity it is: there is far more to the holiday then swaying back and forth in synagogue, listening to our stomachs grumble as we steal impatient glances at our watches, feet hurting from standing and sitting, standing and sitting, seemingly arbitrarily.

There is far more to the liturgy than a seemingly incoherent jumble of stray references to kingship and worship, angelic courts and books of life.

Brilliant Insights from our Ancestors

I believe, and love to imagine, that our ancestors — the rabbis; various members of the Jewish community who were practically inventing a new religion out of whole cloth after the destruction of the sacred Temple — had brilliant insights into the human condition and what we needed out of our prayer life.

Under this narrative, they identified one of the most fundamentally challenging components of being a human being that persists until today: letting go.

The rabbis knew how wracked with guilt we humans can be. (Funny that a people still associated with “Jewish guilt” was concerned with it even then). They knew it would take more than a simple wave of the hand or quick prayer to be able to move forward, no longer weighed down by choices in our past.

Instead, they helped to develop this 25-hour period where we could be in community, seeking to unpack a year’s (a lifetime’s?) worth of missteps, being gentle with ourselves, gentle with those around us, humbling ourselves before God.

Twin Pillars of Yom Kippur

And they did so carefully. During Yom Kippur, we chant the Amidah (along with the Shemah, one of the two central prayers in Jewish prayer) five times — more than the four called for on Shabbat and the three called for on the typical weekday. During each of these five services, we recite the twin pillars of what makes Yom Kippur Yom Kippur: (1) selichot, i.e., the recitation of biblical verses articulating our understanding of God’s merciful quality; and (2) the vidui, i.e., confession.

It is very important to note that selichot come before the vidui: we underscore our understanding of God’s mercy before we embark down the scary path of admitting to ourselves where things went awry–where we began to stray from the path and values we had set for ourselves, whether it was to speak to–and about–others with decency and kindness, or to be generous with our time or money, or to show love to our loved ones.

If we understand sincere, heartfelt confessions (to self, to God, and in community–not to an intercessor) to be integral parts of the healing process, of the expiation process, of the ability to move forward, then we need to make sure we feel safe within ourselves so that we can begin to unearth some of the parts of ourselves that we don’t usually tend to, the parts of ourselves, the memories, that we skip over when we are doing body scans of ourselves or going about our daily lives. The parts we ignore.

Selichot as Elixirs For The Soul

This is where selichot come in. Before launching into a confession, we articulate, and re-articulate, to ourselves, up to thirteen times, what are known as the Thirteen Attributes of God: “Adonai, Adonai, God, merciful and compassionate, patient, abounding in love and faithfulness, assuring love for thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and granting pardon.” We need to till the soil, so to speak. We need to be sure our being is ready for exploration and unearthing. The selichot, these reassurances of God’s mercy, are like elixirs for the soul–for the psyche–enabling our exploration to yield more fertile results. Once we have reminded ourselves of our hoped-for understanding of God’s merciful nature, we are more likely to do the work of the deep-seated self-examination that will hopefully help us turn the corner.  

Of course, we can’t know God’s nature. In fact, the biblical verse from which the rabbis adapted these thirteen attributes actually includes a clause that says “[God also] visits the iniquity of parents upon children, and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations,” (Exodus 34:7). God’s nature, according to biblical tradition, is nothing if not complicated.

And yet, I can’t help but be sympathetic to the rabbis’ decision to omit this clause and to structure the service as they did. I believe a sincere search for God’s mercy will find it–if for no other reason than to allow us to go easier on ourselves. (We are so often our own harshest critics). The rabbis seemed to understand both the need for a no-holds-barred exploration of the self to come to terms with where we had gone off course over the past year and that a precondition to this sort of search was a belief that whatever we found would be treated with mercy by our God and, perhaps more importantly, should be treated with commensurate mercy by ourselves.

 

Need a place for Yom Kippur? We’ve got a list of all the Yom Kippur events for 20s / 30s happening in the Philly Jewish community. 

Nathan Kamesar, Tribe 12’s friend and local rabbinical student, offers Jewish wisdom and timely teachings on our blog. 

 

If I had to identify one theme that embodies the spirit of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, it would be: Kingship. “Hamelech yoshev al kiseh ram v’nisah!” “The King, presiding on a lofty exalted throne!” the cantor chants to begin the morning service. “Zochrenu lechayim melech haftez bachayim,” “Remember us for life, our King, who wishes us to live!” we chant repeatedly during the many Amidah services throughout the day. “Avinu malkeinu chaneinu va’aneinu,” “Our parent, our King, be gracious to us and respond to us,” we sing, mournfully, as the ark is opened.

As beautiful as this language can be, and as lovely and nostalgia-inducing as the melodies are — if you’re like me, the metaphor or idea of God as King is quite difficult to access.

Grappling with “Kings”

I never grew up with kings. I have no reverence for the office of king. I have no awe for the imagery that goes along with kings. (One of my rabbinic mentors, Rabbi Joel Levy, who is British, grew up saying “God save the Queen” and can slip far more easily into the idiom of God as Monarch than I can.)

And yet that is what our ancestors knew. For them the King was all things: creator, judge, sovereign. The same being who had the ability to enact laws had the ability to proclaim that you were free from being sentenced as a result of those laws. The same sovereign who established the society’s moral code could proclaim that you were deserving of mercy even if you had transgressed that code. Imagining God as King — with a celestial retinue, filled with angels as courtiers and divine trumpets blaring, just like we might imagine King Henry VIII’s court, or that of Queen Cersei in Game of Thrones (but nicer) — was probably quite a natural step for them.

For most of us it’s different. Frankly, I have to work pretty hard to open up my soul to a spiritual moment with a set of language and symbols whose cultural reference point is from days gone by, many centuries over.

Two Choices for Challenging Liturgy

That said, I think it’s possible… As contemporary Jews, we essentially have two choices when it comes to challenging liturgy.

(1) We can rewrite it. I am not altogether opposed to this project. Reconstructionists (I am in my final year of study at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College) have made some fairly radical changes to liturgy (eliding references to Jews as the Chosen People, for instance). Other movements have also made subtle changes over the years. We sometimes think about our prayer words as having been essentially etched in stone, but someone had to put pen to paper (quill to parchment? Papyrus?) at some point. Reinvention is a fundamentally Jewish enterprise. There’s no reason this process can’t or shouldn’t continue in an effort to effectuate language that penetrates more authentically to our hearts, given the world we know today.

(2) We can find new meaning in the existing language. This path is compelling for different reasons. One is what my teacher Rabbi Jacob Staub refers to as “accrued holiness”: even if, in the absence of context, it is difficult for us to find meaning in the metaphor Kingship, there is something almost magical about uttering the same words that our ancestors — chosen or inherited — did for centuries, in conditions defying understanding: surreptitiously whispering them behind closed curtains in 15th-Century Spain during the Inquisition; excitedly proclaiming them on the shores of a new home after crossing the ocean to 19th-Century America; and quietly chanting them in some of the bleakest moments of human history during the Holocaust. There is a sense that they have taken on a gravity of their own, even if the underlying content might be different than we would choose today.

Using the existing language is advantageous for a pragmatic reason as well — it is already agreed upon. You can go to most any synagogue or Jewish community around the world and expect to hear the same words on Rosh Hashanah. Having a common liturgy, even if isn’t perfectly structured to articulate our inner yearnings, helps foster unity by allowing us to come together together through shared language.

But we’re back to where we started. If we’re using the traditional liturgy, how do we make meaning of the notion of kinsgship, or other difficult idioms? After all religion, I believe, is supposed to make you feel something. If it’s leaving you feeling empty, either the setting isn’t doing it’s job, or we have to do more work within ourselves.

There are a lot of options here. One is to note that it is OK to let your mind go where it goes. As Rabbi Staub notes:

I often find my mind wandering to surprising, insightful places during services, having nothing to do with the liturgy. I endorse this practice.

Embrace the Idea of Surrender

With respect to Kingship, one idea I rely upon is that of surrender. There are experiences in life well beyond our control. A loved one can get sick or die; a friend can go through something difficult and take it out on us without our understanding why; of lesser gravity, we can send off a job application or an email, hoping for the best but knowing that at a certain point it is out of our hands — faith is in some sense a means of coming to terms with the limits of our ability to determine our fates. There is a reason that the serenity prayer — “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference” — struck a chord with so many, including, it should be noted, through its adoption by Alcoholics Anonymous. We can lose control over our addictions and compulsions. According to twelve-step programs, it’s that recognition of a lack of control that is an essential step on the road to recovery.

We can all learn something from this.

We sometimes look to Rosh Hashanah as a potentially transformational experience. What is a yearning for transformation if not a recognition of the limits of our control over our current situations? To me, if we find ourselves using prayer books that inevitably contains references to kingship, one way to relate to this is to say, “I don’t know what’s out there, but I know I don’t control it all. I know I will ultimately have to be subservient to the whims of the universe. I make my peace with that.”